Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Few college pranks can be said to be more grandly conceived, carefully planned, flawlessly executed, and publicly dramatic

The Great Rose Bowl Hoax was a 1961 prank at the Rose Bowl, an annual Americancollege football game. That year, the Washington Huskies were pitted against the Minnesota Golden Gophers. At halftime, the Huskies led 17 to 0, and their cheerleaders took the field to lead the attendees in the stands in a card stunt, a routine involving flip-cards depicting various images for the audience to raise. However, a number of students from the California Institute of Technology
managed to alter the card stunt shown during the halftime break,
culminating in the display of the word "CALTECH," a common nickname for
the Institute.
The prank received national attention, as the game was broadcast to an estimated 30 million viewers across the United States by NBC.
One author wrote, "Few college pranks can be said to be more grandly
conceived, carefully planned, flawlessly executed, and publicly
dramatic" than the Great Rose Bowl Hoax.
The hoax was planned by a
group of Caltech students, subsequently known as the "Fiendish
Fourteen," in December 1960. They felt that their college, whose teams
often played in Rose Bowl Stadium
a few miles from campus, was ignored up to and during the Rose Bowl
Game. The students decided to use Washington's flip-card show to garner
some attention.
To discover the details behind the Huskies' show, a Caltech student disguised himself as a reporter for a local Los Angeleshigh school, and asked Washington's head cheerleader.
They learned that, by changing the 2,232 instruction sheets, they would
be able to trick unsuspecting Washington fans into holding up the
incorrect signs.
The students broke into the hotel where the
Washington cheerleaders were staying, and removed a single instruction
sheet from a bedroom. They printed copies and altered each page by hand.
On New Year's Eve, three of the "Fiendish Fourteen" reentered the cheerleaders' hotel, and replaced the stack of old sheets with the new.

At
halftime on January 2, the Washington card stunt was executed as the
Caltech students had hoped. NBC cameras panned to the section raising
the flip-cards as they uneventfully displayed the first eleven designs.
The
twelfth design modified the design of a husky into that of a beaver
(Caltech's mascot) but was subtle enough that the audience did not
notice.
The thirteenth design, which called for the depiction of
the word "Washington" in script to gradually appear from left to right
(starting with the capital "W"), ran backwards (with the small letter
"n" appearing first). Other sources say that the routine intended to spell out, "HUSKIES," but that it had been altered to spell out "SEIKSUH." Regardless, it was dismissed as a simple mistake.
The fourteenth design, however, was an unmistakable prank. "CALTECH" was displayed in big block letters on a white background.Mel Allen and Chick Hearn covered the game for an NBC
national telecast. The announcers and the stadium fell silent for
several moments, only to subsequently break into laughter. As the
Washington band marched off the field, the cheerleaders did not give the
signal for the fifteenth and final image. The Huskies were unaware that
the Caltech students had not altered the last design of an American
flag.

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Calling M.Christian versatile is a
tremendous understatement. Extensively published in science fiction, fantasy,
horror, thrillers, and even non-fiction, it is in erotica that M.Christian has
become an acknowledged master, with stories in such anthologies as
Best American Erotica, Best Gay Erotica, Best Lesbian Erotica, Best Bisexual
Erotica, Best Fetish Erotica, and in fact too many anthologies, magazines, and
sites to name.In erotica,
M.Christian is known and respected not just for his passion on the page but
also his staggering imagination and chameleonic ability to successfully and
convincingly write for any and all orientations.

But M.Christian has other tricks up
his literary sleeve: in addition to writing, he is a prolific and respected
anthologist, having edited 25 anthologies to date including the Best S/M
Erotica series; Pirate Booty; My Love For All That Is Bizarre: Sherlock Holmes
Erotica; The Burning Pen; The Mammoth Book of Future Cops, and The Mammoth Book
of Tales of the Road (with Maxim Jakubowksi); Confessions, Garden of Perverse,
and Amazons (with Sage Vivant), and many more.

M.Christian's short fiction has been
collected into many bestselling books in a wide variety of genres, including
the Lambda Award finalist Dirty Words and other queer collections like Filthy
Boys, BodyWork, and his best-of-his-best gay erotica book, Stroke the
Fire.He also has collections of
non-fiction (Welcome to Weirdsville, Pornotopia, and How To Write And Sell
Erotica); science fiction, fantasy and horror (Love Without Gun Control); and
erotic science fiction including Rude Mechanicals, Technorotica, Better Than
The Real Thing, and the acclaimed Bachelor Machine.

As a novelist, M.Christian has shown
his monumental versatility with books such as the queer vamp novels Running Dry
and The Very Bloody Marys; the erotic romance Brushes; the science fiction
erotic novel Painted Doll; and the rather controversial gay horror/thrillers
Finger's Breadth and Me2.

M.Christian is also the Associate
Publisher for Renaissance eBooks,
where he strives to be the publisher he'd want to have as a writer, and to help
bring quality books (erotica, noir, science fiction, and more) and authors out
into the world.